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Kara said, “Do I have to call you that?”
“Mrs. Atwater?” Marlie asked, laughing. “Nah, you just call me Marlie and I’ll call you Kara-Bear. Just like now. That doesn’t change. Okay?”
“’Kay.” Kara felt better.
“Good girl.” Marlie had clasped Kara’s hand again. “Oh, Kara, we are going to be so, so happy.”
“But you’ll still live with us, right?” Kara had asked.
“No.” Marlie got a little more serious. “But we’ll be close. I’ll make sure of it. We’d like a farm or a ranch with dogs and horses,” she confided, dreaming.
She’d always been an athlete and had loved animals almost as much as she loved competition. In an effort to keep up with her brothers, she’d taken up archery and target shooting, just to prove she was as good as they, that girls could keep up with boys. “Actually, I’m better than all of the brothers,” she’d confided in Kara just last week. “They just won’t admit it.”
Now, gazing up at the stars, Marlie said, “Maybe we’ll go up to the lake, you know, maybe Dad and Mom would let us keep the place up. But whatever, it’s going to be so, so cool.”
Kara didn’t like the sound of her living as far away as the mountain house, but Marlie didn’t notice that she’d gotten quiet. “Just remember: This is our secret. Right? You can’t tell a soul. Not Mama or Daddy, not Jonas, not Donner or Sam oranyone!”
And Kara hadn’t.
Not to this very day.
A sadness stole through her as she thought of the sister she’d lost, a sibling whom she had been closer to than her own mother. And now she was getting messages about her.
You don’t know that. The text and voice said, “She’s alive.” You decided that whoever is behind it is talking about Marlie. That’s a leap, Kara. A big leap.
But who else?
She glanced back at the notes again, to the names Tate had listed. Her father’s one-time business partner, Silas Dean, had been written on the yellow page, as well as her parents’ ex-husbands and wives. Leona and Natalie, both married to Kara’s father, and Walter Robinson, her mother’s ex-husband. So many marriages, so many names. Each with his or her own agenda.
And then there was Marlie. Who someone insisted was alive. Could she tell Tate about the text and voice message? Could she trust him with that information? Could she confide to him that she’d thought she was being followed? To that end she walked to the tall window and stared outside to the desolate night. The streets were nearly empty, the river a dark swath with whitecaps reflecting white from the vaporous illumination of the streetlamps near its banks.
For an instant she thought that someone, anyone, could be looking up at her, her entire body silhouetted by the soft glow of interior light. For an instant her blood ran cold and she took a step backward.
God, she could use a drink.
Swallowing back her fear, mentally chastising herself for being a paranoid ninny, she thought she heard voices rising from the floor below. Oddly, it was comforting to hear Tate talking to the delivery person.
Tonight she wasn’t alone.
But he’s a virtual stranger to you, Kara. A man with his own purpose. A reporter who wants your story, the son of a man who died saving you. You cannot trust him; not fully. Don’t drop your guard.
Uneasily she walked back to his desk and the papers strewn upon it. Again she eyed the list of people connected to the tragedy of her family. She noticed arrows and smaller notes scribbled in the margins, words and phrases she couldn’t quite read, but Jonas’s name had been circled several times, and arrows connected it with Lacey Higgins and Donner.
Lacey.
Kara traced the name on the paper with the tip of an index finger.
What about Lacey?
A girl no longer, she reminded herself, though she still remembered Lacey as she had been then, a seventeen-year-old in the virginal white dress, her most famous quote about Jonas still burning in Kara’s memory:
“He said, ‘If I ever find out you were fucking someone else, I’ll take an axe to him first and you next. That way you can watch him die before you go to hell.’”
Kara’s skin crawled. Did Jonas really utter that ugly, blood-chilling threat? Or had Lacey been lying? At the time everyone believed the calm, wide-eyed girl who’d sat so still and straight in the witness box.
Biting her lip while still tracing the letters of Lacey’s name, Kara tried to recall her brother as he had been before the night all the members of her family were so brutally slaughtered. He’d been a hothead, for sure. Angry. Even Natalie, his own mother, had said he was a mixture of “piss and vinegar sprinkled with way too many raging teenage hormones.”
Kara had definitely seen Jonas with the sword earlier that day. She remembered spying on him through the open door to his room. In jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, he swung the old, heavy weapon easily. An athlete by nature, he’d practiced his martial arts moves for as long as Kara could remember. So there he was slashing through the air, spinning, and hopping onto the unmade bed in his bare feet. From atop the mattress he jabbed determinedly, his face twisted in a seething fury as if he were slaying an invisible enemy.
